We're really making progress now. In the last two days, Devin and company have begun to frame the first floor. It's very exciting to see the house begin to take shape. The floor of these two rooms went up in less than a day.

Here I'm helping to measure the height of the studs. Because the foundation wall was built on a hill at a random slope, each stud has to be a different length to make the floor flat. The location of each stud is marked on the sloping wall. I'm walking along with this measuring stick that has a tape measure nailed to it. I put it on the wall and Devin reads the correct height with a transit that looks straight out (kind of like a telescope). My Dad (standing below) wrote the height on the wall. Later we measure the angle of each wall so Carl can cut the boards to the right height with the correct angle. An hour later, the wall was up (and straight).

On July 4 we cut down the oak tree that was overhanging our future garage. As you can see, we used a man lift to reach the tree. The man lift is about 35' up. Because we had just formed the foundation, we couldn't just drop the limbs (they would break the concrete), so we had to tie off each piece and lower it. It took all day to cut the tree back to the crotch that is about 10' up. Many of the pieces that we lowered weighed about 500 pounds. On Sunday we chipped all the brush and cut the limbs into logs. We now have several cords of wood (and some splitting to do).